Taking Back My Life from Mental Illness

News for April 2015

Maintaining a positive mental health is a lifetime commitment. Even if you reach a point of recovery, you still need to maintain that commitment, you have to keep working at it. If you stop working at it, you can relapse. Recovery is not a cure, rather it means you have learned of ways to manage the symptoms in your life. Recovery means you have found a way to take control of the symptoms instead of letting them control you. It means you have found a way to take control of your life.

You still need to be aware of what influences you bring into your life and surround yourself with, you need to make sure that you do not let yourself fall into bad habits and avoid toxic people and situations.

The good news is that even if you relapse, you already have the skills you need to return to a state of recovery. Once you learn the skills, you always have them. They can be hard to connect with at times and we may feel like we no longer have them, but they are there. During these times, we do not need to relearn the skill, we just need to remember how to connect to them. We need to remember we do know the skills, we know how to use them and we know how to use them to help ourselves. It is only the connection we have lost.